


Stuck in the middle (with you)

by Norickayer



Series: Ten Lives We Never Lived (2014 Trope Challenge fics) [10]
Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fuck Or Die, Locked In, Loki is sometimes a girl and never ever a guy, M/M, Other, kind of, more consensual than it sounds I promise, no actual porn because I am boring, sex as an escape strategy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2654057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Norickayer/pseuds/Norickayer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Billy went semi-Demiurge, but it wasn't enough.</p><p>Now he's trapped in Mother's nothing-dimension waiting for her to devour his magic and end the story of Billy Kaplan. This time, the scheming god of mischief can't come to his rescue- because Loki's right there in the cell with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stuck in the middle (with you)

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: discussions of bloodletting
> 
> This is supposed to be part 10 of the series, but the stories aren't connected anyway and this is the 5th one I've finished, so fuck it.

White

Everything in Billy’s line of vision is white. Not painted, not white walls or white stone or anything with texture or shadows or any variations in color at all.

Just

Billy blinks several times, and lifts his hand in front of his face to make sure he hasn’t gone blind.

Nope, his hands are perfectly visible.

He’s back in one of Mother’s cells.

He’d rather be blind- Daredevil copes just fine.

“Oh good, I was hoping you’d wake up.”

Billy jumps, even though it’s obviously not Mother’s voice that shocks him out of his stupor- it’s Loki’s.

“What are you doing here?” Billy demands.

“Hoping I haven’t been locked in a room with the corpse of my teammate. You?” Loki asks.

“Hoping I haven’t been locked in here with the guy who almost got the rest of my team killed,” Billy spits back.

For some reason, this just makes Loki smile.

“You still count me as a Young Avenger?”

Billy is scared and cold and desperate to not be alone in an empty expanse of whiteness, and he is _so_ not in the mood for Loki’s Smug Indifference act.

“Well you seem to be on our side, considering that Mother trapped you in here, same as me,” Billy snaps, “But I reserve the right to kick you off the team if you kill any more kids.”

The smile drops from Loki’s face so fast Billy swears he hears it shatter on the floor.

“Noted.”

Billy feels a jolt of vindictive pleasure at Loki’s obvious discomfort, but it’s chased by a trickle of guilt as well. Does Loki deserve to be reminded of what ze’s done, or is it just petty meanness on Billy’s part? Billy wants to say both are true, and it’s times like these that he wishes there were Aspiring Superhero classes he could take, something like Timetravel Logistics 101 or Metaphysical Ethics 202. Then again, it isn’t like the older heroes are necessarily any better at it than Billy is, so he isn’t sure who he expects to teach him.

“So, Valued Team Member, get us out of here,” Billy says with a self-deprecating smile, as an apology.

Loki grimaces and looks away.

“I can’t,” ze admits.

Billy’s not sure what Loki’s game is now, but it’s clearly falling to pieces. Ever since zir blurted confession mid-battle, ze’s been weirdly vulnerable, and this is the worst attempt at a lie Billy has ever heard from zir lips.

“Of course you can,” Billy points out, “You got me and Teddy out that first time.”

“That was different,” Loki tells him, “I was coming from the outside. The trick doesn’t work from this side.”

Billy stares at Loki uncomprehendingly. “You’re gonna have to walk me through that.”

Loki’s lips twist in annoyance. “It’s exhausting to have to be your exposition monkey.”

This time, Billy swallows his response of ‘well maybe you shouldn’t have sent us on this quest in the first place,’ and merely holds Loki’s gaze until ze gives in.

“This is an un-place,” Loki begins, gesturing all around them at the all-consuming whiteness. “It has no ambient magic to fuel spells. There’s no sky or earth or fire or water to cast from. Look,” Loki scratches zir black nails against the whiteness that could be called the ‘wall’ of the cell. “You can’t even make a mark on the surfaces here. The only magic here is what we bring in with us.”

“Great.”

 

Time passes slowly as the two prisoners separately try to think their way out of their cell.

Billy, despite Loki’s warnings, chants and gestures and mediates in a futile attempt at penetrating the magical dead zone. “I want to get out, I want to get out, Iwanttogetout, _Iwanttogetout_ ,” he repeats endlessly, but other than a warm buzzing under his skin, no results are forthcoming.

Loki chooses a non-magical option. Ze reaches under zir coat for the small dagger ze keeps hanging from a belt. With little fanfare and less enthusiasm, Loki unsheathes it and lunges at a wall. The blade slides across it, refusing to stick or permeate the surface. Loki frowns and tries again, this time putting all zir weight into the stabbing motion.

Loki bounces off the wall and falls to the floor. The blade lands beside zir, broken at the hilt. When Billy looks up from his own efforts, he sees that there isn’t even a scratch on the wall to show for Loki’s efforts.

Loki reaches for the knife blade, presumably to try again. Before zir fingers can touch metal, the blade sinks lengthwise into the floor and disappears.

Loki stares at the spot where the blade once rested. Slowly, ze looks up and reaches Billy’s eyes.

“This is going to be more difficult than I thought.”

 

They stand in silence for an indeterminate amount of time. The utter lack of sound, motion, and color begins to tug uncomfortably at Billy’s mind. Just as he thinks he might try to talk, something finally happens.

The cell shifts. It’s subtle at first. Billy thinks he’s just getting dizzy when he sees the walls slowly stretch lengthwise. He braces a hand against the far wall to try to ground himself, but that only makes the movement more obvious.

“What’s-“

The wall behind Loki is bulging, as if it is a giant white balloon. The cell wall seems to be thinning to accommodate the change. It actually hits Loki before ze notices it, and ze is quick to retreat to Billy’s side of the cell, watching silently as their space shrinks.

Billy imagines for a moment that the wall might inflate until they are crushed to death between the cold white surfaces. It seems messy and painful and pointless. Why would Mother want to kill them this way? Doesn’t she want to eat them or something?

The wall pops.

That’s the only way Billy can think to describe it. The wall balloons inward, the white getting thinner and thinner until it bursts.

There’s a noise like a sonic boom and a feeling like cresting the top of a rollercoaster, and then instead of a white wall threatening to crush them, Billy and Loki are pressed against the far wall, trying to avoid being crushed by a huge scaled green creature. It’s too large, in too small a space to really tell what it is. Its arm and part of a knee encompass Billy’s entire field of vision.

“What the hell is _that_ ,” Billy demands, and the thing finally stops growing.

The arm moves, revealing a face. One cheek is pressed against the ceiling, the neck bent at an angle that makes Billy wince just thinking about it.

“Billy?” Hulkling asks. Then he begins to shrink.

“Teddy,” Billy signs in relief as he falls into his boyfriend’s arms. Billy isn’t at his best, and being alone with Loki is always dangerous. Ze could persuade a tiger to stop eating meat- or a rabbit to start.

“How did you do that?” Loki demands, examining the smooth walls of the cell that has now doubled in size, presumably to include the space of that Teddy had been occupying.

Teddy ignores zir in favor of hugging Billy tighter.

“You burst a cell made of the fabric of reality by growing too much,” Loki says in disbelief. Ze might as well be talking to zirself. “You generated enough pressure to pop the wall between our cells.”

“Yeah,” Teddy agrees, his face pressed into Billy’s hair.

“Good job,” Billy praises him, breathing in the smell of Hulkling.

“Can you do it again?” Loki asks, considering.

“He almost squashed us trying; I’m gonna say ‘no’,” Billy guesses.

“Unless you can protect yourself by magic-?”

Billy shakes his head. “It’s an un-magic space, or something. See?” Billy releases Teddy from his grasp and spreads his arms wide. His eyes light up with magical energy, but nothing happens. He doesn’t float, or spark, or anything. “No spells.”

“Damn,” Teddy mutters.

“No, no, this could still work,” Loki says, excited grin working its way onto zir face. “Air pressure is out, but now we know the cells can be overwhelmed. They have a volume that can be stretched to the breaking point!”

The boys look on, uncomprehending.

“Ok…?”

“We can fill the cell with another substance, enough for it to expand and pop: _magic_.”

“But we can’t use magic,” Billy reminds Loki, wondering if ze’s been forgetting zir own lies.

Loki shakes zir head. “We can’t cast from ambient magic. Spells won’t permeate the cell. But if we can generate enough power-“ Loki bounces one on the balls of zir feet.

“Ok, I’ll bite,” Teddy says. “How do we _generate_ magic?”

“Actions, rituals, things that have metaphysical weight,” Loki explains, as if that’s helpful at all.

“You’re leading up to something,” Billy notes. He may not like Loki very much right now, but ze had spent a good three months with them on Noh-Varr’s ship. They got to know zir pretty well, and not all of it could have been faked. Not even Loki can lie 24/7.

“Could be,” Loki acknowledges.

“Look, we need to get out of here before Mother takes out her temper on the multiverse. Just tell us what we need to do.”

“If we can’t use environmental or ambient magic, we need to use _personal_ magic: blood magic, sex magic, or sacrificial magic.” Loki makes a shrugging motion, as if to say ‘what can you do?’

“… is this is plot to have a threesome?” Billy wonders. The entire situation does seem a bit contrived.

“I swear it isn’t; I wouldn’t manipulate my way into sex and also I really hope we can find another way.”

“Yeah, because we totally believe that,” Teddy says, sarcasm in full force.

“I don’t want to be here, and Mother is probably feeding off of our energy as we speak; why would I be trying to coerce you into sex at a time like this?” Loki asks, reasonably. Billy doesn’t buy it.

“The same reason you tried to convince Teddy that I was making him love me: you want to break us up.”

Loki pretends to consider this. “Evil villain pretends to be friendly to break up the hero team? Makes sense. But I didn’t want you to break up. I was trying to warn you.”

Billy just gets mad, because where does Loki get off pretending to care about them when ze went out of zir way to fuck with their feelings in a way that had _nothing_ to do with zir other schemes, even?

“ _Warn_ us?” he demands. “Yeah, because _I_ was the dangerous one on that team.”

Loki looks confused for a moment, then winces. Billy isn’t sure what that means and isn’t sure he cares, but Teddy has clearly picked up on something.

“You weren’t warning me about Billy,” Teddy guesses. “Or, you were, but you were projecting onto him. You were worried about your own powers.”  

Loki is silent for a moment, then (reluctantly) says, “Maybe.”

“Funny way of showing it,” Billy mutters.

Teddy considers this, then shakes his head. “That doesn’t explain everything. You’ve been flirting with Billy since day one. Maybe you just wanted me out of the picture.”

Loki groans in frustration. “Not everything is about Billy all the time! I was also flirting with _you_.”

“I literally told you that you were too perfect to exist,” Loki continues.

“Oh.”

“I don’t _want_ you to break up. You two are disgustingly affectionate and unconditionally trusting and I hate you for it, a little bit, but that’s because I’m _jealous_.” Loki’s words get more and more frenzied as zir explanation goes on, until the past few words rush out of zir mouth.

Loki stares at the wall instead of looking at either of the boys. Ze is fidgeting with zir hands, and wearing a slightly disgusted frown, and none of zir non-verbal behaviors are indicating ‘honesty’. Maybe that’s what makes it so clear that Loki is actually, for once, being honest.

Loki admitted to being jealous of their relationship, to wanting love and trust and affection. From someone who trades in sarcasm and jokes, this seems profoundly embarrassing. Billy can’t help but think that Loki would only confess to something so vulnerable if it was true, or else if the truth was even more pathetic.

-which is even weirder, because that means Loki’s misguided jealousy is what caused Teddy to _doubt his own existence_. Granted, it’s not as extreme as Loki’s guilt trying to destroy the multiverse. Billy’s still trying to wrap his brain around that, actually.

If he looks at the situation from that lens, he’s glad it was the guilt and not the jealousy that was given form, who knows what Loki’s jealousy would wreak? It could do something like…

put them in a situation where they had to have sex to save the multiverse.

Dammit, Loki.

“It doesn’t have to be sex,” Loki reiterates, trying to point the conversation away from zir vulnerabilities. “Blood and sacrifice are arguably more traditional sources of power anyway.”

“Sacrifice?” Billy asks, “Like killing goats or something?”

“Or something,” Loki agrees. “Combining blood and sacrifice adds to the power, but we don’t have to kill anything. When scientists split an atom, severing the atomic bonds releases the energy that was once contained, right? Think of it like that, but with emotional energy instead.”

“So we have to give up something,” Teddy says, thinking, “How about our phones?”

Loki shakes zir hand sadly, “It won’t work. Your first thought was giving up your phone. You must not be very attached to it. The energy wouldn’t be enough.”

Teddy and Billy glance around and turn out their pockets. A tube of chapstick, two smartphones, some spare change and Billy’s debit card mar the pristine whiteness of the floor. Billy lifts the card up and looks hopefully at Loki, who shakes zir head again.

“Emotional value, not monetary.”

Billy kicks the pile of items away in a moment of spite.

“Fine,” he snarls, “So we’re left with blood or sex?”

“For the record, I vote for blood,” Loki says. “Between the three of us we should be able to spare enough for the spell. It would barely leave us light-headed.”

Teddy begins to look a bit green, and Billy twists his lips in disgust.

“We just… slit our palms and bleed in a spell circle, or what?”

Loki is horrified, or at least pretends to be. “What? No! Of course not! You never cut your palm, that’s stupid. You use your palm too much, it wouldn’t heal easily. We’d cut our forearms or thighs.” Loki tilts zir head, thinking. “Although, I don’t have my dagger with me. We’d have to improvise. Teddy could make his teeth sharper, or shift into something with claws.”

“I’m not doing that,” Teddy declares. “I’m not biting a hole in my boyfriend’s thigh!”

Loki’s eyes becomes a bit more desperate. “He’s a human anyway. It might be safer for just you and I to bleed,” Loki agrees. Teddy does not look reassured.

“We’re not going to bleed you out like some fucking Saw movie,” Billy spits, shuddering at the thought.

Loki pouts and crosses zir arms.

“Alright, well I’m out of ideas.”

Teddy yawns loudly and leans back against a wall.

Loki looks at him, an uneasy expression of zir face.

“The longer we wait, the less energy we’ll have.”

Billy doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like that they’re trapped. He doesn’t like that his powers are useless. He doesn’t like that Loki seems to have all the answers and might just be herding them toward the solution ze wants, _again_. He doesn’t like that he doesn’t know where the others are. He doesn’t like that he’s been away from home for three months. He doesn’t like that Tommy is still missing or that their ‘last-ditch effort’ failed to defeat Mother, and he doesn’t like that the network of young heroes Prodigy called up are probably still out fighting, if they haven’t lost by now.

“Fuck,” Billy says, “We’re going to have to do this, aren’t we.”

Teddy straightens up. “I am _not_ going to hurt you, I can’t-“ he begins to say, but Billy cuts him off.

“Not _that_. The… other thing.”

The trio is silent for a moment. Billy, feeling awkward; Teddy, feeling unsure; and Loki, _looking_ reluctant but feeling god-knows-what.

“I don’t have to be involved,” Loki volunteers. “If I draw the circle and teach you what to do, Billy, you and Teddy _should_ be able to generate enough magical energy between the two of you.”

“So you’ll just, what? Sit in the corner and close your eyes?” Teddy asks.

Loki shrugs. “If you like.”

“Ok, is it just me or is that even weirder than actually having sex with Loki?” Billy asks, twisting his face in disgust. “Then it’s just weird and voyeuristic.”

Loki rolls zir eyes dramatically. “You’ve vetoed everything I’ve suggested, what do you want from me?”

“Maybe the others will find a way out and rescue us?” Teddy suggests.

Billy locks eyes with Teddy, then Loki. It’s obvious that none of them find that a viable option.

“I’d like to seriously reconsider the blood magic option: with Teddy’s shapeshifting and my own, we should be able to-“

“We aren’t bleeding you out.” Billy’s tone is chilly, final. “Look, we’re all adults. We can do this without it getting weird.”

Loki gives Billy a strange look. “If you consider casual sex an intrinsic part of adulthood, Noh-Varr and Kate have seriously-“

“I meant we’re _used to making hard decisions_ ,” Billy bites out, interrupting Loki for the second time.

“Moving on,” Teddy urges them, fighting a smile.

“Right. Ok. Loki, what constitutes sex?”

“If I have to give you ‘the talk’, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Loki, I _swear to god_ , if you could just take this seriously for _ten minutes_.”

“I am an _ancient deity_ , forgive me for being hesitant to have sex with two teenagers!”

“We’re nineteen,” Teddy defends. “Or, I’m nineteen, and Billy will be soon. We’re legal adults. Plus,” Teddy adds, “your age is _way_ less straightforward than you’re making it sound.”

Loki makes an annoyed sound deep in zir throat, but apparently agrees, because instead of arguing further, ze actually answers Billy’s question: “There aren’t exactly a list of accepted positions, if that’s what you’re asking. Anything that generates sexual energy- or sexual pleasure- should work. If anyone has a foot fetish, a massage could even do the trick.”

“So the key is enjoyment?” Teddy says, amazed. “Not like, penetration or orgasm or something?”

“It’s not _fertility_ magic. The Norse weren’t nearly as phallus-centric as you all are. Orgasm helps, but isn’t required.”

“That’s doable,” Billy says, feeling relieved. “Hand-jobs count?”

“Good thing, too,” Teddy agrees, “I don’t think a tube of chapstick would have cut it as lube.”

All three shiver in horror.

“Alright, so we’re doing this,” Teddy says, when no one seems inclined to take initiative. He reaches over to Billy and pulls him into a kiss. It’s familiar and comfortable, and as they both intuitively tilt their heads _just so_ , Billy feels his nervousness dwindling. This isn’t so scary, so strange.

They break the kiss, take a deep breath, and reach for Loki.


End file.
